“What the Nightwoman Texted” by Mark Marino

This poem is a multimedia mashup of poems by Mary Mackey, Tulip Temple, and Carmen Firan, along with paintings by Amy Bernays brought together on a presentation tool called Prezi. Marino takes advantage of this tool’s capacity for positioning, layering, scaling, and zooming path creation to arrange these visual and textual materials in a way that truly remixes them into a new poetic experience. By juxtaposing texts from disparate sources in different formatting, he places their voices in conversation. At least one of these is already in conversation with T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” By arranging them within paintings (with zooming that highlights their brushed materiality) he adds a sense of place to these voices.

A successful mashup leaves its audience feeling like it has experienced something fresh, bursting with original energy as it re-envisions other people’s material. Go full screen with this piece and follow the path Marino has traced through this landscape to discover an act of writing that required very little typing from him but feels like something greater than the sum of its parts.